Possible Path to Closing Pay Gap

It’s 2014, and women are still paid less than men. Does this suggest that a gender pay gap is an unfortunately permanent fixture? Will it still be with us in 50 years? I would predict yes. But by that point, it will be men who will be earning less than women.

My forecast is based on evidence from schools, where it has been easier to work toward a level playing field than in the workplace.

Academically, girls have not merely caught up with boys in performance: they have overtaken them. In a study issued last year, and using data from 2000 to 2009, the economists Nicole M. Fortin, Philip Oreopoulos and Shelley Phipps found that 20.7 percent of female high school seniors had an “A” grade-point average, versus 14.7 percent of boys. In 2012, more than 70 percent of high school valedictorians were girls.

The trend extends into college. One study of Florida public colleges, by the economists Dylan Conger and Mark C. Long and covering the years 2002 to 2005, found that women had higher grade-point averages and were also more likely to stay in school. And the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz also show in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” how times have changed. They report that by the age of 30, a man born in 1945 was roughly 50 percent more likely than a woman to have completed college — but that men born from 1960 to 1975 were less likely to complete college than women. For the group born in 1975, the gap was nearly 25 percent.

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Anna Parini

“Whenever educational opportunities are made available on a relatively equal basis for females,” Mr. Katz told me, “they tend to excel in completion and grades with some field differences.”

As opportunities equalize in the workplace, will we also see a reversal of the gender pay gap?

One reason to think it’s possible arises from why boys underperform in school in the first place. The prime suspect for this underperformance is boys’ shortage of what social scientists call noncognitive skills. They have trouble sitting still, focusing and exerting self-control. Brian A. Jacob, an economist at the University of Michigan, found in a study published in 2002 that boys’ behavioral problems explain a substantial share of women’s advantage in college enrollment. One paper drove home this point by showing that girls outperform boys on tests requiring preparation, but not on those measuring aptitude.

Employers demand these same noncognitive skills. Those that it takes to succeed in college — time management, writing ability, structuring tasks on your own, working in teams — are also needed in the modern workplace.

Despite my crisp prediction, there are two reasons to believe that the trend seen in schools may not translate to the workplace. First, some evidence points to other gender differences in psychology. Laboratory experiments — many by the economist Muriel Niederle of Stanford — show that men fare better in competitive environments, in part because they are more confident. (Yes, overconfidence can be a help in such environments.) Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task — say, solving math problems — men are more willing to enter competitions based on that task. Men also show less risk aversion.

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These differences — competitiveness, overconfidence and risk-seeking — could conceivably have greater benefits in the workplace, at least in some jobs, than they do in school.

A second factor is that jobs and society are still structured for traditional gender roles. Family commitments and household responsibilities will not disappear. Closing or reversing the gender gap, as Ms. Goldin noted in her presidential address to the American Economic Association, “must involve alterations in the labor market, in particular changing how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility.”

It will also require change in social norms and identities, as the economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, at the University of Chicago, and Jessica Pan, at the National University of Singapore, have shown. They have found that if a woman is likely to earn more than her husband, based on a statistical prediction model, she is less likely to work outside the home. And when she does work and earn more, the marriages are less happy and more likely to result in divorce.

For the gender gap to reverse, these norms — or, at least, women’s responses to them — would have to change. Ms. Bertrand notes that in Asia, “where gender norms are particularly strong, successful women are opting out of traditional family structures to focus on work.” Rates of marriage and fertility are particularly low for successful Asian women. Of course, this may not be the way we would like to see norms change.

Ultimately, no one can predict with certainty the future of the gender gap; there are simply too many uncontrollable variables. But, clearly, the current debate is missing something.

If the pay gap leads us to consider men to be more productive than women, the schooling gap should symmetrically lead us to consider the opposite. Perhaps it is women who are more productive. If women’s choices — such as taking time off to rear children — make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys’ behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?

Maybe we shouldn’t be asking when women will catch up. Maybe they’ve already caught up, and we should instead ask whether society is holding them back.

Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of economics at Harvard. You can follow him on Twitter at @m_sendhil.

A version of this article appears in print on May 11, 2014, on Page BU6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Possible Path to Closing the Pay Gap. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe